Of Men and Monsters
by nemesisqueer
Summary: At nine years old, the blood of nearly every shinobi family in Mist is already on his hands.


He is only a child, but he is a danger to the village, and your orders leave little room for speculation. At nine years old, the blood of nearly every shinobi family in Mist is already on his hands. You were not there to witness the bloodbath as he massacred your students, but even the farthest corners of your village were not spared the screams.

One hundred and twelve fine shinobi children—fifty-six pairs in all—who should have been your legacy. You are not a sentimental man. Each year, half of the roughly one hundred children you select will die at the hands of the other half, allowing the jounin to select their students from only the strongest. The ritual is gruesome, yes, and bloody, but your village hasn't earned its moniker through lenience. It has been this way for as long as you can remember, since before you graduated from the academy yourself.

The examination serves its purpose; Mist is poor compared to its to the villages of neighboring countries, and there isn't work to go around. The exam weeds out the weak, the unworthy, those that would drag on the village's resources. It adheres to _rules_.

By killing every last candidate, the boy has flouted these rules. To the Mizukage, this act of violence is as good as treason, and you hold no illusions about the way Yagura feels about traitors.

 _Formally_ , Momochi Zabuza is now a genin of your village. _Formally_ , the order for his assassination does not exist—at least, not outside the walls of Mizukage's office. When the village wakes in the morning, the child will have simply disappeared—yet another name on a long list of unbalanced rogues fleeing in the face of responsibility. The tracker corps will receive no orders to locate him; he will simply cease to be.

You think of the dozens of child-sized urns lined up in neat rows at your village's memorial wall, waiting for burial. As you enter the house, you feel no remorse.

He may be a child, but he is a dangerous child, and dangerous children grow into dangerous adults.

The demon is sleeping when you find him. His fists, curled tightly around the twisted sheets, leave cracked brown stains where the sweat from his palms mixes with flakes of day old blood. He _looks_ like a child, with his slender, tawny arms wrapped around a bare pillow for comfort.

But you know that looks can be deceiving. There is still blood on his sparse, furrowed brows, and more still on his thin, frowning lips. Inside his open mouth, you can see too many rows of sharp, pointed teeth.

A monster.

There are others in your village like him, mockeries of humanity with cruel, razor smiles. You have trained many of them yourself. There is evil in the others too—all the malice and tempestuousness of the distant sea roiling beneath their cool gazes—but this boy is different somehow. Even in his sleep, you can feel it coming off of him in waves.

His dark eyes are open when you reach his bedside. "You're here to kill me." Up close, he is smaller than you imagined. His voice is high and childlike, without the preternatural harshness you expected, and his cool, even tone reminds you of his mother in her final moments.

"Yes."

* * *

You are still alive when he drags your body into the narrow stairwell. Each step grinds dust and splinters of unfinished wood into many small and almost perfectly round tears in your flesh. Unresponsive fingers fumble at the kunai now lodged beneath collarbone on instinct, but there is no danger of pulling it out; the boy's bites have severed the tendons in your arms with surprising precision.

Your body is limp and every nerve screams as he drags you, a man more than twice his size, out into the dark street. Your hazy vision makes it impossible to focus on your surroundings, so you focus on the boy instead, on the dark bruise forming an unbroken ring around his neck where your trained hands choked what you thought was the last of the life out of him.

He collapses in the street not far from the front step, but it is far enough. The sun is rising over the distant walls of the village, painting the perpetual fog a rich orange.

There are footsteps somewhere behind you. Someone has followed the trail of blood. You hope blindly that they will save you, will save your reputation.

The boy's eyes dart wildly from side to side, but he doesn't move. Exhaustion, or perhaps lack of oxygen, is finally getting the best of him.

The man stops and crouches beside him, his sallow face adorned in red. You cannot see most of his features clearly, but his pointed teeth break the pattern of stripes that paint his lower face. Another devil. He nudges the boy with a foot.

A knife drops between you. You reach for it, vainly, but your hands grasp only empty air.

"Well, kid," the man says, sounding impatient, "finish the job."


End file.
